Disable ESXi Password Complexity

A part of my job as a VMware Certified Instructor is to update our lab systems whenever new vSphere versions come out.

After upgrading from 5.5 to 6.0 I decided we should change passwords, however I was unable to choose the unsecure password I had decided to use:Weak password: based on a dictionary word and not a passphrase.

Obviously, we need to mess with the password complexity requirements to resolve this.

Password complexity is managed by the /etc/pam.d/passwd file.

Here is the default content:

To temporarily disable password complexity requirements we can comment out the first and third lines and edit the second with command: vi /etc/pam.d/passwd